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It has been suggested that this article be split into articles titled Community (settlement) and Community (sociology). (Discuss) (July 2018)

A community of interest gathers at Stonehenge, England, for the summer solstice.

Part of a series on
Community
Academic studies
Community studies Community psychology Computational sociology Cultural anthropology Internet studies Philosophy of social science Rural sociology Social geography Social philosophy Social sciences Sociocultural evolution Urban planning
Key concepts
Affinity (sociology) Collectivism Community of interest Community of practice Community of place Community service Communitarianism Community politics Group (sociology) Group dynamics Imagined community Organization Sense of community Small-group communication Social capital Socialization Solidarity (sociology)
Community development
Community-based management Community building Community economic development Community development planning Community organizing
See also
Outline WikiProject Community Community portal Category:Community building Category:Community development Category:Localism (politics) Join the Community community
v t e

A community is a small or large social unit (a group of living things) that has something in common, such as norms, religion, values, or identity. Communities often share a sense of place that is situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms. Durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community. People tend to define those social ties as important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions (such as family, home, work, government, society, or humanity at-large).^{[1][need quotation to verify][2]} Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties (micro-level), "community" may also refer to large group affiliations (or macro-level), such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.^[3]

The English-language word "community" derives from the Old French comuneté, which comes from the Latin communitas "community", "public spirit" (from Latin communis, "shared in common").^[4]

Human communities may share intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, and risks in common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.^{[citation needed]}

Perspectives of various disciplines

Archaeology

In archaeological studies of social communities the term "community" is used in two ways, paralleling usage in other areas. The first is an informal definition of community as a place where people used to live. In this sense it is synonymous with the concept of an ancient settlement, whether a hamlet, village, town, or city. The second meaning is similar to the usage of the term in other social sciences: a community is a group of people living near one another who interact socially. Social interaction on a small scale can be difficult to identify with archaeological data. Most reconstructions of social communities by archaeologists rely on the principle that social interaction is conditioned by physical distance. Therefore, a small village settlement likely constituted a social community, and spatial subdivisions of cities and other large settlements may have formed communities. Archaeologists typically use similarities in material culture—from house types to styles of pottery—to reconstruct communities in the past. This is based on the assumption that people or households will share more similarities in the types and styles of their material goods with other members of a social community than they will with outsiders.^[5]

Ecology

In ecology, a community is an assemblage of populations of different species, interacting with one another. Community ecology is the branch of ecology that studies interactions between and among species. It considers how such interactions, along with interactions between species and the abiotic environment, affect community structure and species richness, diversity and patterns of abundance. Species interact in three ways: competition, predation and mutualism. Competition typically results in a double negative—that is both species lose in the interaction. Predation is a win/lose situation with one species winning. Mutualism, on the other hand, involves both species cooperating in some way, with both winning. The two main types of communities are major which are self-sustaining and self-regulating (such as a forest or a lake) and minor communities which rely on other communities (like fungi decomposing a log) and are the building blocks of major communities.

This is a simplified example of a community. A community includes many populations and how they interact with each other. In this example there's an interaction between the zebra and the bush, and the lion and the zebra, as well as the bird and the organisms by the water, like the worms.

Key concepts

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies described two types of human association: Gemeinschaft (usually translated as "community") and Gesellschaft ("society" or "association"). Tönnies proposed the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy as a way to think about social ties. No group is exclusively one or the other. Gemeinschaft stress personal social interactions, and the roles, values, and beliefs based on such interactions. Gesellschaft stress indirect interactions, impersonal roles, formal values, and beliefs based on such interactions.^[6]

Internet communities

Groups of people are complex, in ways that make those groups hard to form and hard to sustain; much of the shape of traditional institutions is a response to those difficulties. New social tools relieve some of those burdens, allowing for new kinds of group-forming, like using simple sharing to anchor the creation of new groups.

One simple form of cooperation, almost universal with social tools, is conversation; when people are in one another's company, even virtually, they like to talk. Conversation creates more of a sense of community than sharing does.

Collaborative production is a more involved form of cooperation, as it increases the tension between individual and group goals. The litmus test for collaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.

An online community builds weaker bonds if allows users to be anonymous. Clay Shirky, a researcher on digital media, states in reference to the audience of an online community, "An audience isn’t just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn’t just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack." The sites that offer online communities, like Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest allow users to "stalk" their community and act anonymously.^[7]

Sense of community

In a seminal 1986 study, McMillan and Chavis^[8] identify four elements of "sense of community":

1. membership,


2. influence,


3. integration and fulfillment of needs,


4. shared emotional connection.

To what extent do participants in joint activities experience a sense of community?

A "sense of community index (SCI) was developed by Chavis and colleagues, and revised and adapted by others. Although originally designed to assess sense of community in neighborhoods, the index has been adapted for use in schools, the workplace, and a variety of types of communities.^[9]

Studies conducted by the APPA^[who?] indicate that young adults who feel a sense of belonging in a community, particularly small communities, develop fewer psychiatric and depressive disorders than those who do not have the feeling of love and belonging.^{[citation needed]}

Socialization

Lewes Bonfire Night procession commemorating 17 Protestant martyrs burnt at the stake from 1555 to 1557

The process of learning to adopt the behavior patterns of the community is called socialization. The most fertile time of socialization is usually the early stages of life, during which individuals develop the skills and knowledge and learn the roles necessary to function within their culture and social environment.^[10] For some psychologists, especially those in the psychodynamic tradition, the most important period of socialization is between the ages of one and ten. But socialization also includes adults moving into a significantly different environment, where they must learn a new set of behaviors.^[11]

Socialization is influenced primarily by the family, through which children first learn community norms. Other important influences include schools, peer groups, people, mass media, the workplace, and government. The degree to which the norms of a particular society or community are adopted determines one's willingness to engage with others. The norms of tolerance, reciprocity, and trust are important "habits of the heart," as de Tocqueville put it, in an individual's involvement in community.^[12]

Community development

Community development is often linked with community work or community planning, and may involve stakeholders, foundations, governments, or contracted entities including non-government organisations (NGOs), universities or government agencies to progress the social well-being of local, regional and, sometimes, national communities. More grassroots efforts, called community building or community organizing, seek to empower individuals and groups of people by providing them with the skills they need to effect change in their own communities.^[13] These skills often assist in building political power through the formation of large social groups working for a common agenda. Community development practitioners must understand both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions. Public administrators, in contrast, need to understand community development in the context of rural and urban development, housing and economic development, and community, organizational and business development.

Formal accredited programs conducted by universities, as part of degree granting institutions, are often used to build a knowledge base to drive curricula in public administration, sociology and community studies. The General Social Survey from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and the Saguaro Seminar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University are examples of national community development in the United States. The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York State offers core courses in community and economic development, and in areas ranging from non-profit development to US budgeting (federal to local, community funds). In the United Kingdom, Oxford University has led in providing extensive research in the field through its Community Development Journal,^[14] used worldwide by sociologists and community development practitioners.

At the intersection between community development and community building are a number of programs and organizations with community development tools. One example of this is the program of the Asset Based Community Development Institute of Northwestern University. The institute makes available downloadable tools^[15] to assess community assets and make connections between non-profit groups and other organizations that can help in community building. The Institute focuses on helping communities develop by "mobilizing neighborhood assets" – building from the inside out rather than the outside in.^[16] In the disability field, community building was prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s with roots in John McKnight's approaches.^[17][18]

Community building and organizing

The anti-war affinity group "Collateral Damage" protesting the Iraq War

In The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace (1987) Scott Peck argues that the almost accidental sense of community that exists at times of crisis can be consciously built. Peck believes that conscious community building is a process of deliberate design based on the knowledge and application of certain rules.^[19] He states that this process goes through four stages:^[20]

1. 
   Pseudocommunity: When people first come together, they try to be "nice" and present what they feel are their most personable and friendly characteristics.


2. 
   Chaos: People move beyond the inauthenticity of pseudo-community and feel safe enough to present their "shadow" selves.


3. 
   Emptiness: Moves beyond the attempts to fix, heal and convert of the chaos stage, when all people become capable of acknowledging their own woundedness and brokenness, common to human beings.


4. 
   True community: Deep respect and true listening for the needs of the other people in this community.

In 1991, Peck remarked that building a sense of community is easy but maintaining this sense of community is difficult in the modern world.^{[21][further explanation needed]}

The three basic types of community organizing are grassroots organizing, coalition building, and "institution-based community organizing," (also called "broad-based community organizing," an example of which is faith-based community organizing, or Congregation-based Community Organizing).^[22]

Community building can use a wide variety of practices, ranging from simple events (e.g., potlucks, small book clubs) to larger-scale efforts (e.g., mass festivals, construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside contractors).

Community building that is geared toward citizen action is usually termed "community organizing."^[23] In these cases, organized community groups seek accountability from elected officials and increased direct representation within decision-making bodies. Where good-faith negotiations fail, these constituency-led organizations seek to pressure the decision-makers through a variety of means, including picketing, boycotting, sit-ins, petitioning, and electoral politics.

Community organizing can focus on more than just resolving specific issues. Organizing often means building a widely accessible power structure, often with the end goal of distributing power equally throughout the community. Community organizers generally seek to build groups that are open and democratic in governance. Such groups facilitate and encourage consensus decision-making with a focus on the general health of the community rather than a specific interest group.

If communities are developed based on something they share in common, whether location or values, then one challenge for developing communities is how to incorporate individuality and differences. Rebekah Nathan suggests^{[according to whom?]} in her book, My Freshman Year, we are drawn to developing communities totally based on sameness, despite stated commitments to diversity, such as those found on university websites.

Community currencies

Some communities have developed their own local exchange trading systems (LETS)^[24] and local currencies, such as the Ithaca Hours system,^[25] to encourage economic growth and an enhanced sense of community. Community currencies have recently proven valuable in meeting the needs of people living in various South American nations, particularly Argentina, that recently suffered as a result of the collapse of the Argentinian national currency.^[26]

Community services

Community services are a wide range of community institutions, governmental and non-governmental services, voluntary, third sector organizations, and grassroots and neighborhood efforts in local communities, towns, cities, and suburban-exurban areas. In line with governmental and community thinking, volunteering and unpaid services are often preferred (e.g., altruism, beneficence) to large and continued investments in infrastructure and community services personnel, with private-public partnerships often common.

Non-profit organizations from youth services, to family and neighborhood centers, recreation facilities, civic clubs, and employment, housing and poverty agencies are often the foundation of community services programs, but it may also be undertaken under the auspices of government (which funds all NGOs), one or more businesses, or by individuals or newly formed collaboratives. Community services is also the broad term given to health and the human services in local communities and was specifically used as the framework for deinstitutionalization and community integration to homes, families and local communities (e.g., community residential services).^[27]

In a broad discussion of community services, schools, hospitals, clinics, rehabilitation and criminal justice institutions also view themselves as community planners and decisionmakers together with governmental leadership (e.g., city and county offices, state-regional offices). However, while many community services are voluntary, some may be part of alternative sentencing approaches in a justice system and it can be required by educational institutions as part of internships, employment training, and post-graduation plans.

Community services may be paid for through different revenue streams which include targeted federal funds, taxpayer contributions, state and local grants and contracts, voluntary donations, Medicaid or health care funds, community development block grants, targeted education funds, and so forth. In the 2000s, the business sector began to contract with government, and also consult on government policies, and has shifted the framework of community services to the for-profit domains.

However, by the 1990s, the call was to return to community and to go beyond community services to belonging, relationships, community building and welcoming new population groups and diversity in community life.^[28][29][30]

Types of community

Participants in Diana Leafe Christian's "Heart of a Healthy Community" seminar circle during an afternoon session at O.U.R. Ecovillage

A number of ways to categorize types of community have been proposed. One such breakdown is as follows:

1. 
   Location-based Communities: range from the local neighbourhood, suburb, village, town or city, region, nation or even the planet as a whole. These are also called communities of place.


2. 
   Identity-based Communities: range from the local clique, sub-culture, ethnic group, religious, multicultural or pluralistic civilisation, or the global community cultures of today. They may be included as communities of need or identity, such as disabled persons, or frail aged people.


3. 
   Organizationally based Communities: range from communities organized informally around family or network-based guilds and associations to more formal incorporated associations, political decision making structures, economic enterprises, or professional associations at a small, national or international scale.

The usual categorizations of community relations have a number of problems:^[31] (1) they tend to give the impression that a particular community can be defined as just this kind or another; (2) they tend to conflate modern and customary community relations; (3) they tend to take sociological categories such as ethnicity or race as given, forgetting that different ethnically defined persons live in different kinds of communities —grounded, interest-based, diasporic, etc.^[32]

In response to these problems, Paul James and his colleagues have developed a taxonomy that maps community relations, and recognizes that actual communities can be characterized by different kinds of relations at the same time:^[33]

1. 
   Grounded community relations. This involves enduring attachment to particular places and particular people. It is the dominant form taken by customary and tribal communities. In these kinds of communities, the land is fundamental to identity.


2. 
   Life-style community relations. This involves giving primacy to communities coming together around particular chosen ways of life, such as morally charged or interest-based relations or just living or working in the same location. Hence the following sub-forms:
   
   1. community-life as morally bounded, a form taken by many traditional faith-based communities.
   
   
   2. community-life as interest-based, including sporting, leisure-based and business communities which come together for regular moments of engagement.
   
   
   3. community-life as proximately-related, where neighbourhood or commonality of association forms a community of convenience, or a community of place (see below).
   
   


3. 
   Projected community relations. This is where a community is self-consciously treated as an entity to be projected and re-created. It can be projected as through thin advertising slogan, for example gated community, or can take the form of ongoing associations of people who seek political integration, communities of practice^[34] based on professional projects, associative communities which seek to enhance and support individual creativity, autonomy and mutuality. A nation is one of the largest forms of projected or imagined community.

In these terms, communities can be nested and/or intersecting; one community can contain another—for example a location-based community may contain a number of ethnic communities.^[35] Both lists above can used in a cross-cutting matrix in relation to each other.

See also

• 
  Community – Wikipedia book
  


• Circles of Sustainability


• Communitarianism


• Community theatre


• Engaged theory


• Outline of community


• Wikipedia community

Notes

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Community.

Look up community in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Barzilai, Gad. 2003. Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.


• Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage: 2000. What is globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press.


• Chavis, D.M., Hogge, J.H., McMillan, D.W., & Wandersman, A. 1986. "Sense of community through Brunswick's lens: A first look." Journal of Community Psychology, 14(1), 24–40.


• Chipuer, H.M., & Pretty, G.M.H. (1999). A review of the Sense of Community Index: Current uses, factor structure, reliability, and further development. Journal of Community Psychology, 27(6), 643–58.


• Christensen, K., et al. (2003). Encyclopedia of Community. 4 volumes. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.


• Cohen, A. P. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Routledge: New York.


• 
  Durkheim, Émile. 1950 [1895] The Rules of Sociological Method. Translated by S.A. Solovay and J.H. Mueller. New York: The Free Press.


• Cox, F., J. Erlich, J. Rothman, and J. Tropman. 1970. Strategies of Community Organization: A Book of Readings. Itasca, IL: F.E. Peacock Publishers.


• Effland, R. 1998. The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations Mesa Community College.


• Giddens, A. 1999. "Risk and Responsibility" Modern Law Review 62(1): 1–10.


• 
  James, Paul (1996). Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community. London: Sage Publications.
  


• Lenski, G. 1974. Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.


• Long, D.A., & Perkins, D.D. (2003). Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Sense of Community Index and Development of a Brief SCI. Journal of Community Psychology, 31, 279–96.


• Lyall, Scott, ed. (2016). Community in Modern Scottish Literature. Brill | Rodopi: Leiden | Boston.


• 
  Nancy, Jean-Luc. La Communauté désœuvrée – philosophical questioning of the concept of community and the possibility of encountering a non-subjective concept of it


• 
  Muegge, Steven (2013). "Platforms, communities and business ecosystems: Lessons learned about entrepreneurship in an interconnected world". Technology Innovation Management Review (February): 5–15.
  


• Newman, D. 2005. Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life, Chapter 5. "Building Identity: Socialization" Pine Forge Press. Retrieved: 2006-08-05.


• Putnam, R.D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster


• 
  Sarason, S.B. 1974. The psychological sense of community: Prospects for a community psychology. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 1986. "Commentary: The emergence of a conceptual center." Journal of Community Psychology, 14, 405–07.


• Smith, M.K. 2001. Community. Encyclopedia of informal education. Last updated: January 28, 2005. Retrieved: 2006-07-15.